


the child piper

by feralphoenix



Category: Blaze Union
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 07:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's stuck in a crusade-shaped rut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the child piper

**Author's Note:**

> _(in front of me, a stranger talks_ – and the ruin of hamelin)

_“Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.”_

– The Player, _Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_ (Tom Stoppard)

 

I.

From the moment that she sees him close up, naked of the obscuring cover of tree branches and dappled twilight through them, she hears her grandfather’s voice in her head.

It’s absurd, is what it is. She has sailed around the world and walked across thirty countries and her past is supposed to be left in all the dust she’s walked. Nothing, in all the years since she’s left home, has triggered her memories of her childhood so strongly. There is no reason for this to make them resonate so, to pry up the nails on the wooden box she had shut them into.

But she looks at the prophet, and in the back of her mind she is six years old again, sitting on her knees on the dusty straw mat, and her grandfather is reciting the ancient records of their illustrious ancestor from memory, describing when Gill was first visited by an unaging youth in chains, a one-eyed angel with magical power beyond human comprehension.

The prophet wears a mask. If his face were bare, she thinks, this wouldn’t be happening: if she could just clearly see that one of his eyes has not been carved out, she’d be able to reassure herself of how ridiculous it is to wonder if he’s some half-legendary specter from a past she’s not interested in.

Before she’s done hanging at the back of the army and wondering, the battle is over and Garlot is already welcoming the prophet into their ranks, relaxed and friendly. She wants to tell him not to do it, that it feels like an ill portent, but she can’t think of any rational reason to.

“Medoute, what is it? They’re already leaving without us,” Siskier says, and she tries to make herself smile. But further down the forest trail Garlot is red-faced and smiling and talking to the prophet like they belong walking side-by-side, and she can’t.

 

II.

_Thou shalt not suffer a devil to live._

When she looks at Gulcasa, her hands itch for a weapon.

It’s stupid, and she knows it. She’s been conditioned to handle dragonspawn this one way for years and years and years, until it’s become like reflex to want to destroy it when it’s in front of her. She has never actually done so before—really, the lack of Brongaa’s get to exterminate in the modern world was why she had begun to question the necessity of her upbringing in the first place—but all her training has built her up this way.

But the thing is that even though she resents it, she knows better than most why that kind of strict training used to be necessary. As obvious as it is to say so—demons aren’t human. They are monsters by nature, all of them, humans with mixed blood included. Demon instincts create a drive for violence and brutality and conquering others by force, for sacrificing others in one’s own gain. And demons have such innate power that it just isn’t safe to allow a demon to run about unchecked in human society.

That goes for the Dragon of Purgatory and its descendants more than most. The legends of her people have told her this. Her grandfather has told her this. This knowledge has been drenched into the marrow of her bones, it flows through her blood, she holds it in her lungs with the air she breathes.

She’s not in love with her heritage and her power, like most of the people in her family. And this smacks of destiny so much that it grates. But she has knowledge and awareness; she is the only one among them with real knowledge and awareness, or at least the only one who cares. That makes her responsible. She knows, and knowing, she can’t sit idly by and do nothing.

Thou shalt not suffer a devil to live.

But—at the same time. She rejected all the self-importance of her family and her conditioning and left them of her own will, for a lot of reasons. She’s never wanted to think that there was any special meaning in being a dragonslayer’s child. So it might be wrong, too, to let her ancestors decide what to do in a situation like this.

The historical records of what demons are and what they’re capable of are a completely different matter than her family’s attitude, or they should be. Because those records are hard, immutable fact. If left unchecked, Brongaa would have laid ruin to this entire world. Therefore, if left unchecked, that monster’s spawn would do the same.

She feels as though there’s a contradiction somewhere, in all her overthinking. She doesn’t know what it is, but she knows that it’s there, and so she hesitates.

She’s been with Gulcasa for months before his bloodline was laid bare. He’s the antithesis of his ancestor: Gentle, and caring, and fighting out of a desire to shelter the weak. He values power on a personal scale, but doesn’t hold others to the same standard; his temper can make him stupid and destructive, but she’s taught him to rein it in. If it’s possible for her to have been raised a dragonslayer and reject those teachings, then theoretically it should be possible for him to retain human values even though he’s less than human.

When she looks at Gulcasa, her hands itch for a weapon.

She clenches and unclenches her fists and avoids staring at him as much as she can, considers enlisting someone else for a second opinion until she can discover the contradiction in her thoughts.

She knows Gulcasa, or at least wants to believe she does. Until he shows definite signs of having changed, she’ll stay her hand.

 

0.

_(No, he says, and turns his back on her so that she can’t see his face: Throw them in jail. Silence rings in her head, like she’s gone deaf; even as the weapon is wrestled out of her hands and she’s marched into the moldering depths of the castle, she doesn’t understand what she’s witnessing or what she’s just seen and heard.)_

 

III.

She goes to stand at the great open window overlooking the vineyard when she hears that the New Bronquian Empire has fallen, grips the smooth stone sill with both hands, stares at the texture of the limestone until it blurs.

“We made a mistake,” she says thickly. Her voice comes out harsh, much more angry than sad.

“Medoute, we’ve talked about this more times than I’ve ever wanted to.” Jenon’s words are quiet. She can’t tell whether he sounds a little resigned or just cold. “You weren’t wrong. _We_ weren’t wrong. There’s nothing to grieve over. Garlot died three years ago, and everyone else accepted their death sentence when they decided to keep following him like there was nothing wrong.”

“I’m telling you, we made a mistake—everything we did, we did it for the wrong reasons. If I hadn’t acted rashly then, if we had stayed with the others, then maybe it wouldn’t have come to this.”

Jenon is quiet for a long while. “You don’t know that for sure.”

What she doesn’t say to him out loud is: She doesn’t know _anything_ for sure.

What she doesn’t say to him out loud is: If it wasn’t a mistake, then why is it so nauseating to think that once she started suspecting, she was blind to everything but _Aries_ and _Brongaa_ and she doesn’t know how much that line of thinking decided things for her?

What she does say to him out loud is: “I’ve been running away all my life, but I’ve never been able to outrun the feeling of being a prisoner to my blood. I’m tired of that feeling.”

Jenon doesn’t say anything back. She raises her head by inches, stares out over the sea of grapes to the golden horizon, and she thinks of the empire burning.


End file.
